throwaway901617

Yes and its good for people to understand this isn't limited to just war -- companies are held to a similar standard regarding their culpability for various things.

If a company's leadership allows a culture of sexual harassment to exist (or unsafe working conditions, etc) then they are liable for claims of harassment (or worker safety lawsuits, etc). But if they can show they have policies in place and that they actually enforce them then they can reduce their liability.

This is why so many corporate rules ultimately exist. And why people may be fired over seemingly small things because it provides documented evidence that they are enforcing policies and if something happened it was directly contrary to policy and must have been hidden from leadership in order for it to occur.

Sandia Lab is a government agency there is no business model. They provide testing for lots of federal services including running the Tonopah Test Range for national security testing.

Interaction with Sandia may have been through an innovation contract ie SBIR or STTR which puts federal dollars directly into commercial R&D efforts for products with both government and commercial value. There's a LOT of SBIR/STTR stuff happening right now with COVID etc and it could give them access to Sandia as a requirement for testing efficacy of the device.

I don't have a dog in this fight at all and am skeptical of the claims, and Sandia isn't peer review, but it does appear to be independent testing which should count for something.

I'm curious if you found "The Button" April Fool's joke a few years ago as fascinating as I did?

For anyone who doesn't know, that AF reddit posted a sub that had a countdown timer and button that could be pressed to restart the timer. It was not revealed what would happen when the timer reached zero.

What ensued was simply amazing. Spontaneous communities and factions sprung up dedicated to pressing vs not pressing. They created their own subs and plotted and shitposted to themselves and each other. "Neutral" factions sprung up. They developed their own lingo and culture and everything. The anti-pressers referred to the "Filthy Pressers" etc.

It went on for MONTHS.

To.me it was a beautiful microcosm example of humans self selecting into social groups and creating in groups and out groups.

I'm curious if you did any research on that particular episode in reddit history?

Index funds make up about 15% of the total stock market holdings so it's not impossible for both of those to be true.

Index funds hold a significant number but that doesn't have to be the majority.

Also the "corporations are people" thing really comes from the fact that the legal system prefers to adapt existing law to new situations rather than create all new parallel legal theories for each situation.

Since corporations take on some of the duties that an individual would otherwise do the courts created what they call a "legal fiction" where they treat corporations as if they are people (while knowing they literally aren't) so they can more readily adapt the existing laws that apply to people to the corporations and then adjust as needed from there.